Tag Archives: external tables

The end of the European Football season is coming into view.
In some leagues the battle for the title, or against relegation is reaching a peak of intensity.
Nails are being bitten throughout the continent…unless you are a fan of one of those teams who are running away with their League – Bayern Munich, Juventus, Celtic…Luton Town.
In their fifth season since relegation from the Football League to the Conference, Luton are sitting pretty in the sole automatic promotion place.
Simon is desparately attempting to balance his “lucky” Christmas-cracker moustache until promotion is mathematically certain. Personally, I think that this is taking the concept of keeping a stiff upper-lip to extremes.

“I’ll shave it off when we’re definitely up !”

With the aid of a recent Conference League Table, I’m going to explore the Preprocessor feature of External Tables.
We’ll start with a simple example of how data in an External Table can be processed via a shell script at runtime before the results are then presented to the database user.
We’ll then demonstrate that there are exceptions to the rule that “Simple is Best” by driving a coach and Trojan Horses through the security hole we’ve just opened up.
Finally, in desperation, we’ll have a read of the manual and implement a more secure version of our application.

I recently spent some time working with Venkata, an Oracle programmer and keen cricket fan :

Venkata smiling the smile of a man whose team have won the cricket world cup twice more than…er…Wales.

This post is about the fun and games involved in the bulk loading of data into Oracle – especially when it includes floating point values.
In Venkata’s honour, I’m going to explore this topic through the medium of the career of Sachin Tendulkar…

At this point it’s probably worth wandering off the point to explore some of the highlights of The Little Master’s career.

India’s tour of England in 1996 has been largely forgotten. However, it proved to be a watershed in our hero’s test career.
The first test of the series at Edgebaston was not untypical of the time – Indian batsmen skittled in conditions totally alien to them. The could only muster a paltry 219 in their second innings and none of them got beyond 18…apart from Tendulkar, ninth out for 122, made with a serenity that contrasted starkly with the chaos surrounding him.
It was in the very next match, at Lords, that India granted test debuts to two batsmen who themselves would prove quite useful over the years. Surav Ganguly marked the occasion with a century. Rahul Dravid fell an agonising five runs short of doing the same.
The fourth member of India’s vaunted middle-order announced himself in the next series we look at, against Australia.
Having been soundly beaten in the first test of the series, India came back the hard way in the second test.
VVS Laxmans 281 not out, with the not inconsiderable assistance of Dravid (180) and Harbhajan (13-196) became only the third team in the history of Test Cricket to win after following on. This against arguably the best team to have ever played the game who had their record winning streak of 16 consecutive tests ended somewhat emphatically.
The 2004/05 series against Bangladesh is included because Tendulkar’s highest test score (248 not out) was made in this series.
The 2009/10 series against South Africa is indicative of the journey that India made during the course of Tendulkar’s career.
At this time they were vying with South Africa for the status of the world’s leading test nation.

Back to the techie stuff. What I’m going to cover is :

What happens when you insert a floating point value into an INTEGER column

I met up with an old friend recently. Deb and I were in Toronto, hometown of a certain Simon Jennings.
Apart from being a top bloke, Simon was also my first mentor in the mysterious ways of SQL, a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi to my Anakin Skywalker, but without the light-sabers.

Ah those heady days when the world was young…and I first discovered ROWNUM.
That pseudo column was one I used often when investigating the structure and data within tables. It was also, the source of some confusion.Continue reading →

This week’s missive is coming to you from the netbook. Deb and I have pushed the boat out this year and we’re currently in Canada for our holiday.
This has nothing at all to do with Oracle External Tables, but does explain the flavour of the examples that follow. Continue reading →